With these writings, I intend usually to document our adventures in such a way as to inspire others towards having adventures of their own. On this occasion, I personally would have a difficult time saying that the plan we executed was a good idea. With our final day in Zion, we decided to try one of Zion’s longer hikes to see one of the world’s largest freestanding rock arches. The hike was about 14 miles round trip and it was after noon by the time we reached the trail head from the park’s remote northern entrance. The weather that day had decided to be less than cooperative, making for a chilly and terribly windy hike. 
The first section of the hike I must admit surprised me with yet another hidden gem of landscape as it wound down towards the river through a seasonally riparian meadow. The stream kept twisting back and forth forcing the hiker to hop from rock to rock in its crossing. Should one ever tire of this landscape, the peaks of the mountains surrounding the Zion canyon were always visible to make you wish you had a camera that could capture them the way we could see it. Soon we left this pleasant sheltered area for a harsh dry landscape full of stunted pine trees and deep footprints in the now hard dried mud of the trial. After what seemed like an eternity, we reached the arch. Rather than being neatly beside the trail, the trail ended in an area of trees beside a creek with the only indication of where to find the arch being one that someone had scratched into a trail sign that read “look up” with an arrow. High up above where we were, jutting out of the side of a cliff maybe a thousand feet above us was the red rock arch. Following another brief four hour jaunt we arrived back at the car gratefully before dark and completely exhausted. 
Of all the expenses of our trip, our stay that night in the near-by town of Beaver at the Old Country Inn may have been one of the most appreciated.
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